So I had a company ask me to look over their PPC account earlier this week with a view to taking over management from one of the “big companies”. At first glance everything looked good. Usually when you open up these accounts for the first time it’s truly depressing, nothing’s been done, the account doesn’t look organised, the bids are… Read more →

Matt Cutts of Google posted a video last week outlining some of the factors that are taken into consideration by his webspam team when deciding if a link is to be considered a poor quality paid for link. To give you some background if you’re not familiar with this, Google’s guidelines forbid selling links and the resulting purchase of links… Read more →

I’m going to write a few articles about the history and background a a few of Google’s more serious updates, starting with Google penguin. These are designed to give website owners an idea of Google’s philosophy and strategy as well as a broader understanding of the tactics and techniques Google employs when considering the value of your content. Penguin in… Read more →

If you have well organised PPC campaigns, each ad group should contain an ideal set of keywords that focus on a central theme. Thereafter, my own personal choice is to have total control of each keyword with a comprehensive understanding of its ROAS (return on ad spend) and more fundamentally an overview of its ROI. Central to profitability of each… Read more →

So I wrote last week about the ‘advocacy pyramid‘ and how essentially I see successful digital marketing and SEO and being scrum based; today I want to elaborate slightly on the role of the ‘activist’. The reason digital marketing is done badly so frequently is that website owners really struggle to find that essential balance of building an exceptional user… Read more →

When in discussion with folks regarding the current SEO landscape and many people’s confusion about what direction to head in and fear of incurring penalties I often refer to what I call the ‘Advocacy Pyramid’, I thought I’d take a moment to try and explain what I mean by that on here. The cornerstone of good rankings for any site… Read more →

For some time now Google have been facing growing criticism for their cumbersome and scattergun approach to punishing website owners it perceives to have broken its webmaster guidelines in relation to their link profile. This was compounded by recent Google webmaster tools updates which have been reported to contain sample unnatural links citing sources as bizarre as the BBC and… Read more →

I was reading a blog post recently that outlined the cost to website owners of the EU cookie law which comes into force on May the 26th, as well as assessing the cost as well into the billions the article contained some interesting comments in the comment thread. One that really fascinated me was from a guy that was basically… Read more →

One thing you constantly get a sense of when discussing SEO services and costs with clients and potential clients is the confusion surrounding quality and costs and the level of understanding that surrounds what we do and its value. There are many different ways to hire an SEO specialist to work with and I’m going to write a separate post… Read more →